


Synthesis

by rat_ke



Category: Day6 (Band)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, um
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:35:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26145736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rat_ke/pseuds/rat_ke
Summary: YES this is based off of 3willbefree YES I am still mad at that show (the stuff after the first chapter won't be quite so much like 3willbefree lol cuz the first ep was great and I loved it but then I'm going on my own adventure). Also probably based off of TripleH 365 fresh cuz like...how could it not be?I made this for my friend <3
Relationships: Kang Younghyun | Young K/Original Female Character(s), Kang Younghyun | Young K/Park Sungjin, Park Sungjin/Original Female Character(s), sungjin/youngk/original character poly
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	Synthesis

**Author's Note:**

> YES this is based off of 3willbefree YES I am still mad at that show (the stuff after the first chapter won't be quite so much like 3willbefree lol cuz the first ep was great and I loved it but then I'm going on my own adventure). Also probably based off of TripleH 365 fresh cuz like...how could it not be? 
> 
> I made this for my friend <3

Sungjin looked in at the corn snake curled beneath her log tunnel, hiding herself beneath the rusty coils of her thin body. He wished he could take her out of her enclosure and keep her on his shoulder or hold her in one hand as he went around and fed the fish. He felt that way looking at all the reptiles, eyes closed as they basked beneath their heat lamps. Something about them made him sad, especially as he stared at them through glass, disconnected from their world, a mere observer into their lives that they didn’t know he controlled. He felt connected to these creatures confined to the purgatory of a rack in a small store. Part of him pitied him, while another part of him understood them. He felt a strange need to protect them, to show them that they were loved. He wanted to keep them close to his body, cup them in his hands and tuck them against his chest, as if he could transfer his affection better the closer they were. 

Sometimes he thought he was too sensitive for this job. When one of the animals had stayed in the store for too long he started to feel connected to it, giving it a name in his head and talking to it when no one was there. He wanted to adopt them himself and line the walls of his apartment with their cages until both his work and his home were indistinguishable...but the pets would hold him down. Mobility was of the utmost importance to him.

He wandered back to the front desk, standing behind it and leaning down on his elbows. The two windows at the front of the shop framed the small expanse of street that he stared at all day long, until it almost felt like the only place that existed in the world was the stretch of road directly before him, the bright swirl of a 7/11 slurpee abandoned on the curb across the street, the elderly man who stared into the shop behind the slurpee for what could have been 5 minutes or could have been 40. 

Today the asphalt was glimmering with moisture. The sky was close and damp. No rain fell, but Sungjin’s hair had condensed into wet clumps as he walked to work in the morning, and the sleeves of his crew-neck were damp as he pulled on his apron. The city felt lonely when the weather was like this. Hardly anyone came into the shop, and he was alone here for the closing shift, but he preferred working alone. He had grown accustomed to spending his time silently, and now he found that the conversation and attention he had longed for as a child made him uneasy. That was why he felt comfortable only with the pets living their lives in little glass boxes all around him. He knew there was nothing he could say to them that would make them fear him, nothing he could do would put them in danger, none of them were hired to watch him or find out information through him. 

He checked the clock again. He could start closing in half an hour.

* * *

Three blocks away from the pet shop, Younghyun put his guitar into its case. The heat of the lights shining on him and the warmth of many bodies jostling in the small bar brought an uncomfortable sheen of sweat across his forehead. A droplet of sweat sliding down his temple had distracted him during his last song, along with the amused gaze of the woman with long, sleek hair and a violet dress sitting alone at a table in the far corner. He suddenly felt less like a person performing music and more like someone whose performance was their body itself. The chords he pressed into the strings didn’t matter anymore, now he was worried about the way his hair looked, if his black pants were a little bit too tight, what she would think seeing that he was wearing the shirt she had bought for him…

He made the process of putting away the guitar as complicated as he could, pulling the coins and feeble collection of bills out of the body of the guitar case, tucking his capo and pick into the compartment in the center of the case, laying the guitar gently against the red plush lining, placing his hand flat against the strings once or twice before closing the case and slowly securing the latches. He stepped off the low stage, counting the tips once, twice, three times, then tucking them into his wallet. He knew she was watching him all this time, probably smiling that pretty, belittling smile all the while. He took a deep breath as he pushed his wallet into his back pocket. He tucked his guitar case by the corner of the stage and walked over to the table. 

He smiled brightly, using a finger to move a section of his silver hair away from his eye. He perched on the stool. Veronica stared at him with her dark eyes, her eyelashes bold with mascara. Her lips were plum colored, and the same color was imprinted on the side of her martini glass, which she pinched with two fingers. She rested her face against her other hand, knowing that she looked beautiful and unapproachable. 

“The second to last song was lovely,” she said. “Would you like a drink?”

“It’s alright, I’ll get it, they give me a free one for playing…”

Veronica smirked, the closest he ever saw her come to laughing, and stood up. She held up a hand to stop him from moving and turned, flicking her hair over her shoulder. While she stood by the bar, Younghyun looked around at the people around him, trying to see if any of them were watching them. He had often told Veronica to meet him outside after he was done playing, but she always turned up part of the way through his set. When he asked her about it she would just smile and refuse to answer. 

She placed a drink before him, a cosmopolitan by the looks of it. He took a large sip right away. 

“You’re still nervous?” She asked, situating herself on her stool. She pulled her hair over her shoulder and smoothed it out with her fingers, her long acrylic nails flashing between the dark strands like machetes through vines. 

“Only when you come in here…” he said. She didn’t look at him, instead pulling out her phone and looking at the screen for a moment. She sighed. 

“It’s my husband,” she said. Younghyun nodded. She left her seat again and walked quickly towards the front door.

Younghyun took another sip of his drink. He hoped it would get rid of the knot of anxiety in his stomach. For the past few weeks he had been contemplating a hundred ways of telling her that he didn’t want to do this anymore...but there were so many reasons to keep going, and the only reason he really had for stopping was that he was worried about people seeing them, and maybe that he just didn’t like spending time with her all that much. He would lay in his bed at night, his phone held in his hand, trying to find the courage to text her, but then he would think of the time before he had been seeing her, when he worked all day and played music at whatever bar would let him and still barely had enough money for rent and food. It had been a long time since he had gone to the store and bought the cheapest loaf of bread hoping it would last him until he got paid. Now he had enough money to get takeout on his way home, he had a new phone, she even bought him a hard case for his guitar. She regularly bought him clothes, even though he was often too embarrassed to wear them because they felt too fancy to him. But there was nothing he could do to calm the hard feeling of sickness in his stomach; a restless kind of dread which made him want to get on a bus and let it take him as far away as he could possibly get, disappear from this town and everyone he knew and feel his life peel off around him, leaving him with nothing but a future as yet untouched and undecided. He had enough money stored away to last him until he could find a job somewhere else…

He watched Veronica reappear at the door, her expression dead and distant, like the face of a nameless woman in some old painting who no doubt lived a life echoing between the same walls of the same gaunt mansion, dreaming of something that was different but not really knowing what ‘different’ could be. With every pace she drew nearer Younghyun felt himself pushing all thought and feeling into a deep recess of his mind, a place even he couldn’t truly access, leaving only enough of him to drive the beautiful face Veronica craved and to subdue the cloying emotional turmoil within him. The familiar feeling of numbness muffled his thoughts and feeling like he had slipped into a sleeping bag and zipped it up completely, leaving him in a stuffy cocoon. This was how he felt when he was with her, drifting, flat, a man acting out a version of himself that lived only in the mind of the woman he was trying to please.

* * *

Fah leaned on the sink in the bathroom, the heels of her palms pressing against the cold porcelain with enough force to send dull pain crawling into her wrists, her fingers hanging almost limp, her fingertips barely resting on the sink. Her long hair, dyed a muddy kind of red which faded into her brown roots around the point of her eyebrows, was secured in two long braids which she had worn the day before as well, quickly redoing them in the morning before her class. She used a knuckle to smear away the greyish puddle of water beneath her eye, trying to make the eyeliner smudging down into her lower lashes appear completely intentional. She wiped away the tears on the other side too. Grey smudges ran from the corner of her eyes to her hairline. She pulled a paper towel out of the dispenser and patted at them, trying to make them at least blend in with her foundation as much as she could. 

Her eyes were still far too red to return to work. Her 15 minute break was being stretched to its very limits and it wouldn’t be long before someone came to look for her. She breathed deeply, trying to shove all of her thoughts out of her mind and regain composure, but every thought that she kicked out turned and dove back into her head with renewed force. She was so tired, worn down by her tight schedule of the computer programming classes she had signed up for and the job that she was using to pay for them, and now, almost a year and a half into busting her ass to scrape together this meager education, she was questioning everything. She hated programming more with each new day, and she had hated it for longer than she wanted to admit. 

When she entered highschool she had firmly decided that she would do  _ anything _ to get an education in programming. Everything had been so fun then. She would sit at the computer in the school library at the end of the day for the two hours until her mom got off work and wring the internet dry searching for any information she could find about programming. She loved the way something beautiful could be created out of combinations of mere symbols and numbers, the way she could communicate with the computer and together they could create things that felt like magic. Then dreams started to become reality, and she realized that reality was going to ruin them. She pushed on anyway, until she became aware that she was making herself hate the thing she had once enjoyed so much. Now she was left with nothing. Her goals, the path she had carefully laid out for herself, it was all gone, and all she had was a job that frustrated her, schoolwork that made her bitter and a whole lot of wasted time and money. Resentment boiled through her and she lifted her hands, pulling them close to her chest to stop herself from punching the wall, or better yet, punching that girl with the cheerful yellow sweater reflected in the mirror before her. 

A knock at the door rattled through her head.

“Fah, there’s a line out here.”

“Coming,” she said. Her voice was curt and broke a little at the end of the word. She pulled out another paper towel and gently pressed it against her gummy eyelashes, trying to soak up some of the wet mascara. 

She threw out the paper towel with far too much force and gripped the door handle, taking in three short breaths before pulling the it open. 

* * *

Younghyun ran, the sound of his feet hitting the pavement echoing off the quiet storefronts on either side of the narrow street. His ears roared as if he were underwater beneath a crashing wave, being carried by the powerful current, not knowing where the sky was, finding the ground only by an elbow sinking into cold sand. He couldn’t distinguish the sound of his own feet from the feet of the man pursuing him, nor could he judge the distance between them. This street was too long and too narrow. Younghyun knew that his only chance of survival against a man with a gun was not letting him get a clear shot. He glanced down the small alleys between buildings as they flashed past, frantically trying to find somewhere to duck in and hide. There was another street ahead of him. He turned right onto it. Above him, directly in his eyesight, was a white sign glowing slightly from a light within it that read ‘pet shop’ in red letters. The sign was clearly very old; it was fading and had a crack along running diagonally through the O and the P through which the light shone brightly, like a bright burst of orange lava against the black rock of a volcano. There was a small gap between the pet shop and the next store. Younghyun ducked into the narrow alley, widening his eyes as he was thrown into darkness. He moved quickly down the alley, each hand trailing down the wall on either side of him.

He ducked around the corner at the far end of the alley, and crashed into another person. He gripped the fabric of their sweatshirt and turned himself around, almost using the person as a shield between him and the dark space of the alley where the man with the gun could appear at any moment. Younghyun raised his head and looked into the startled eyes of the person he was grabbing. His eyes were soft and round, and they reflected the dim light around them almost as if they were glistening with tears. His nose pulled focus to the center of his face, soft yet strong. His lips hung open slightly as he looked at Younghyun like he had seen a ghost. Younghyun let go of the blue sweatshirt he had balled in his fists, taking a quick step back like he had just found a bear coming at him out of the darkness of the forest. 

“Sungjin?” he gasped.

Sungjin blinked slowly, as if he was trying to process who he was looking at and why he was here. “Younghyun, what are you-?”

“Shh,” Younghyun pressed his hands into Sungjin’s chest and bent his head, heaving in a couple of breaths, his lungs burning, his heart beating hard enough to pump blood through an elephant. He looked into Sungjin’s eyes again. “Is there any way out?” he asked, his voice feathery and faint. 

“This alley goes behind all these shops,” Sungjin said, his voice lowered to a murmur. “You can only get back onto that street out front, but you can go between any of the buildings…”

Younghyun growled in frustration, turning and leaning his head against the brick wall beside them. He pressed his forehead hard against the stone, trying to force it to  _ think _ and stop spinning with adrenaline. 

The man was not far behind him, but he hadn’t yet come down the alley, so he must have turned the corner and not realized where Younghyun had gone. That would give him a little bit of time, but not much. It wouldn’t be hard to realize where he had gone. This man didn’t seem like the type who would give up until Younghyun was bleeding out on the pavement.

He turned and looked at the stone wall boxing them in, creating a dark pathway behind the line of shops cluttered with a few dumpsters overflowing with trash bags. It was low enough that he could probably get over it. It was his only option right now.

“What’s on the other side of the wall?” Younghyun asked.

“A parking lot. But it’s a bigger drop on the other side...”

Younghyun stepped onto the stack of wooden pallets beside the dumpster. It was still an awkward height even from that vantage point. Sungjin quickly came over and knelt, clasping his hands together and holding them out. Younghyun stepped into the cupped hands and Sungjin hoisted him up on top of the dumpster. The dumpster made a huge, echoing  _ boom _ like a giant drum as Younghyun flopped on to it. He scrambled onto all fours, trying to keep his weight off of the middle of the plastic lids. He scooted sideways and was able to sit down on top of the wall. 

Fuck. The drop was much bigger than he had imagined. He hesitated. It was certainly  _ possible _ , but he didn’t know how he would be able to land without hurting himself enough to seriously slow him down, especially with the boots he was wearing. He looked at the cars scattered around the lot, reflecting the light of the street lamps in the dark. The buildings past the lot looked so distant. If he could just run that way, surely it would be much harder for the man to catch up to him. He breathed in and leaned towards the parking lot. The world spun for a moment and he turned his face back towards the alley, closing his eyes and balling his fists in frustration. He opened his eyes and saw Sungjin looking up at him helplessly. Movement drew Younghyun’s eyes up to the door in the back of the building beside the one where Sungjin must work. A girl with a yellow sweater and two long braids backed out through the door, holding a bag of trash in each hand, one dragging on the ground behind her. 

Like a nightmare, footsteps echoed around them. Sungjin turned towards the alley Younghyun had come from, and the girl at the door stopped, looking up, first seeing Sungjin, and then slowly looking up at Younghyun trapped on top of the wall.

Younghyun breathed in again, preparing to take his only route of escape. 

The man appeared between the shops. His outfit was surprisingly well put together for a hitman, wearing charcoal grey jeans and a plum colored corduroy jacket over a dark turtleneck. His hair was buzzed down to a light brown fuzz and his face was determined but not frightening on its own.

The girl with the trash bags yelped as she saw the gun held boldly in the man’s large hand. She dropped the bags and stepped back. The man glanced at her, but quickly passed over her. His focus was Younghyun. He turned his body, pointing the gun at Younghyun, then looked to his other side. He stopped, the gun straying off target as his arm dropped slightly. Younghyun looked with confusion at Sungjin, whose body was curling inwards as though he was uncomfortable...but not at all scared.

“S-Sungjin?” The man said, his voice surprisingly light and delicate. 

The girl darted forward, locking the man’s arm under hers and wrestling the gun out of his grip. She backed away back towards her abandoned trash bags, holding the gun with both of her hands, which even Younghyun could see were shaking.

The man turned his back on Sungjin to face the girl, reaching into his waistband and pulling out a sturdy knife. 

“Give it back,” he said, quite calmly. 

“Don’t move!” The girl commanded, her voice ringing off the brick walls. 

“Wait-” Sungjin said, lifting a hand slightly. Younghyun didn’t know if he was speaking to the man or to the girl.

The hitman quickly advanced towards the girl, everything in his stance and movement showing that this wouldn’t end well for her. He tightened his grip on the knife. The girl screamed, and the sound of the gun tore through the tight air between them. The man took another step forward and the gun rang again. The girl kept screaming, but dropped the gun. Her face looked almost frozen to Younghyun, her mouth wide with shock and her eyes round. The hitman was bent over, a hand clutching at his stomach. The girl thrust her shoulder into the man’s side and he toppled over, his body crashing into the wall and then collapsing on the ground. The girl backed away from the man quickly, pressing her back into the brick wall. 

Sungjin rushed past her and scooped the gun off the ground.

“Oh my god,” the girl said, her eyes focused only on the man before her, his blood slowly gliding over his fingers and across the dusty ground, his face contorted in pain. “Oh my  _ god _ .” 

Sungjin grabbed her hand and turned to Younghyun. His face was suddenly completely composed, stony and almost frightening. “Come on,” he said. His voice was rough. 

Younghyun felt like his body was stone. The air around him was cold and the silence after the gunshot felt wrong. 

“Come  _ on _ ,” Sungjin said, more firmly.

Younghyun’s breath shuddered and he scrambled off the wall, landing hard on the ground, lurching forward as he landed. Sungjin turned, pulling the girl away down the alley. Younghyun rushed after them, looking at the blur of the body they were leaving behind, thinking with horrible clarity how his life, their lives, were about to completely change forever. Tears of shock squeezed out of his eyes and he ran after Sungjin blindly, following him up the deserted street illuminated in bubbles of amber by somber streetlights. 

Sungjin stopped beside an old silver car a block and a half away. He pulled out a key and unlocked the door, chucking the gun onto the seat and leaving the door open. He walked around to the driver’s side and got in. 

The girl climbed into the passenger seat, picking up the gun and placing it in her lap like a child holding their favorite toy. Younghyun got into the back behind the girl. He leaned forward and rested his head on her seat.

Sungjin started the car and the vibrations sizzled through Younghyun’s skull.

Led by their own puddle of yellow light, they drove off down the street. Younghyun tried to breathe, tears coming from his eyes almost uncontrollably, his mind rolling through the blood he had seen tonight, the deflated bodies…

After a few moments of silence, Sungjin’s voice came to Younghyun’s ringing ears, still crisp but with a more gentle edge now.

“Younghyun...”

Younghyun slid his hands up to cover his face, shaking his head slowly. “He killed her,” He said, his voice rough. “He was coming to kill me but he killed her.” A wave of sickness washed over him and he sat up, leaning back against the headrest and closing his eyes. Over and over he watched Veronica fall onto the dirty carpet of the cheap room, he heard the  _ bang _ that rattled the windows and sent chills tearing through his veins. He felt the burn in his chest as he found himself running as fast as he could down the dark streets, waiting for a bullet to bury into his skin and bowl him over. 

He opened his eyes, trying to escape the flashes of the night replaying in the darkness inside his head. The street was hauntingly quiet, as if the whole city was sitting in anticipation, waiting for the resolution of the three people fighting against time in the small car. 

In the front seat, the girl kicked her legs against the dashboard. “Fuck!” She yelled. “What the fuck did we just do?”


End file.
